Technical Field
The present disclosure generally relates to electronic circuits and, more specifically, to circuits using random numbers and including one or several random number generation circuits.
Description of the Related Art
Random or pseudo-random numbers are currently used in encryption or security applications. The use of random numbers facilitates masking data to be protected (for example, secret keys) in digital processings, typically encryption algorithms. Random numbers are also used in ciphered transmission or authentication systems.
For the use of a random number to produce its effects, it must be as little deterministic as possible. Further, it must not be likely to be imposed by an attacker, for example, in the context of a fault injection attack. Indeed, if the random number can be distorted and lose its non-deterministic character, this introduces a weakness in the security of the algorithm exploiting the random number.
It is thus provided to associated processes of verification of the non-deterministic character of the generated numbers to random number generators, for example, by performing statistical tests over a variable depth (in number of bits of the random number).